what are they supposed to do- release feature patches every month the same way that hardware makers release revised editions and incremental models? Would you trust a microsoft patch which upgrades the filesystem? I'm not talking about a new media player or email client but some patch to the actual OS.
I would rather wait for a new OS version than add another card to the teetering tower (ok, XP ain't *that* unstable;)) so at least the whole system has been tested to be compatible with itself. If everyone else has a similar attitude then I guess the best we can do is wait the 1-3 years between versions and be grateful for what we get. One thing microsoft doesn't need is more pressure to rush their software to market.
I've got to reply to this. Firstly check out some different shops. You definitely can get a six month old game with far more than a $10 discount in Oz.
Secondly, what are you smoking and can I have some please? Games don't just come from the US. A lot come from the UK, France, Germany, even Australian studios make games. Why on earth would the US to AU exchange rate be involved here? Australia has its own economy, is its own market and has its own market balance. Or are you saying that you believe Australia is a satellite state of the US and the $A should bounce up and down along with the $US? Check the box of your most recent game. It will say 'printed in Australia' and so will the CD. It's made in your country by your countrymen and priced for your market. Why should another country's currency have an effect on that?
If you were smart what you would do to take advantage of this favourable exchange rate is order 'made in USA' games from the USA over the net. Pay in $US which you bought with $A and you'll save $A20. Use your brain to solve your problem, not your mouth to complain about it.
And finally piracy is huge everywhere. Now please, don't bogart that blunt, pass it over here.
You try before you buy but you had already played right through to the end and still hadn't decided whether you were ready to pay for it or not?
Maybe I'm dumb but what on earth would have motivated you to go to the store and buy the game after you'd already completed it?
I've heard this argument again and again that 'if it's really good I'll buy a copy just to put on the shelf to reward the developers.'. It's bullshit. Once in a blue moon I believe you might do that for a very special game but the prospect of paying $50 for something which you won't use makes a game's chances of getting onto that shelf, well... let's just say slim. The fact that you played the game through to the end, then found a bug and said
Patch or no, failing to catch bugs like that is simply unacceptable. I pay for games that are worth my money.
suggests to me that you were never serious about buying it. Even though you extracted its full purchase value from it. That's not try before buy that's just getting the game for free. I'm not judging you for that - I couldn't give a crap - but don't lie to yourself and especially don't lie to me.
bluGill, that's the first sensible post that I've seen about this whole "I have to buy the whole album to get one song and all the other songs suck" complaint which you always hear in these threads. Anybody who hates 90% of an album by an artist they like needs to seriously question their taste in music.
They used to be called "album tracks" and that's where you find the artist's true sound and personality; what their music is really like when they're not trying to make a no.1 single. Bands like U2 and Queen always had killer tracks on their albums that you would never hear on radio or on a Greatest Hits collection.
These little nuggets are also great because *you* discovered them; it wasn't being forced to hear them 28 times a day on the radio and TV that made you like them, it was simply because you connected with them. Corny as it sounds, that makes them special.
Just wanting to have the hit singles and showing outright contempt for the rest of the music is like sucking the jelly out of a donut and throwing the rest away.
Nobody rides it because it's not actually 'open' yet. It's only running a couple of hours a day, nobody seems to be sure why, but it will start running full time next week or the week after (can't remember).
The taxi ride to and from the airport is just *painful* after a 10-hour flight from Paris or Vienna; it can easily be 1.5 hours and vs. the Transrapid's ten minutes or so is for me just unthinkable. The money difference is negligible considering what stuff costs in Shanghai. $US5 is like seven cans of coke or your half of a nice meal but the speed and convenience (it drops you off right next to a Metro station), not to mention the geek thrill factor, because - as you'll find out - the whole trip is a lot of fun, the decision between taxi and transrapid is as no-brainer as they come.
There is *no way* I'm wasting three hours of my life taking taxis to or from the airport next time I'm in Shanghai.
Wish I had Mod points, cause that was funny. For all mods who didn't understand or who are reading at +2 please click and read about the British scientist who created a bomb which skiped along the water surface, impacted the wall of a dam, rolled down to the wall's base and then exploded, destroying an important German manufacturing area in WWII.
What does a cheap PC cost? $299? $200? If I offered you $200 would you take it? I hope you would.
These PCs are not for/. readers, they're not for our parents either. These are for people who know *nobody* who knows about computers. All they know is that it's 2003 and everybody is supposed to have a computer in their home. And this one is free. It's like a free gift of $200. And they have to watch some ads. For you and me that's a dealbreaker but not for some people.
Get off your high horse. Some people *like* the idea of a free couple of hundred dollars. It's nice that you don't but don't condemn other people for liking free money.
Great post. I believe that's the reason too. I remember (not personally) president Johnson turning up in Australia and doing the same thing to get Aust. into Vietnam, basically just by blowing a whole load of sunshine up the PM's backside and using his vanity and gullibility (and greed, I'm sure) as the key. I found it funny that little Johnny H. didn't even need the president to convince him to go, Colin Powell was enough.
It really made a joke of the Australian people that their leader could be so easily manipulated and even be made to put the US govt. before his own people. The sad thing is that unlike Tony Blair John Howard has a very good chance of being reelected, even though he went against the wishes of the majority of his citizens.
I hope that they kick his arse out onto the street and replace him with someone who is willing to put the interests of his own country ahead of the dictates and bribes of some foreign govt. Take a tip from how New Zealand has always done it; one of the only countries generally brave enough to stand up to the US when they need to.
Australia is too nice to remain a fascist state.
PS. Howard and Blair will be going to hell, but not for a good few years yet, so that doesn't help anyone.
I am amazed. The whole war was for spoils (oil, right?) and Bush is rewarding his allies and punishing his opponents. You're my new guru, Geoff. I thought it was far more complex than that but you really opened my eyes.
And you figured this out all by yourself? Amazing indeed.
My statement was misguided, or your interpretation of my statement is myopic and unimaginative? The Iraq deals are called 'spoils of war'. This is when the victor(s) divide up the profit-making opportunities in the conquered country amongst themselves. Germany, France and Russia, um, weren't in the war. They're not among the victors and that's why America won't share the spoils with them. It makes sense to me.
By the way, count how many British and Australian companies land the gravy contracts. They won't be getting any, but I hope to God that was never the reason for them joining the war, and that's a very important point to make. Actually on second thoughts I hope that's precisely why they joined, because then they just learned a valuable lesson.
This situation, however, has absolutely fuck all to do with the Iraqi war! How hard is that to understand? Australia helped in the war, Australia gets (maybe) favourable treatment **in matters concerning Iraq and the aftermath of the war** but this is just some guy who fucked up, went somewhere where he wasn't welcome and now has a problem. Oh and he's from Australia. What possible relevance does this have to Australia helping in the Iraq war? Why should America have any obligation to help him? Does this mean now that if an Australian on holiday in the US can't afford a hotel that the US govt. has to give him a hotel room because Australia helped in the war?
So you're saying that a human being from Australia should get better treatment from Americans than a human being from France or Germany, because of the support during the war? It's nice that you'd still disagree with it but think for a minute... it's a ludicrous statement. Politics are irrelevant here.
The Australian govt. didn't send this guy there, he's not representing Australia so his nationality shouldn't play any part in this.
Would be great if it really worked that way though, I could pull out my old Australian passport next time I go though US customs and they'll let me go to the front of the line in front of the Chinese, French and Germans.
That's not really why you guys went to Iraq, is it? To buy a 'special treatment for all our citizens/preferred ally' card?
WTF does supporting the US in the war have to do with this? You went there because your government thought it was the right thing to do, right? Not because you wanted to use it as some kind of guilt trip or bargaining chip in the future...
right?
I'd like to add my system, Meddling Kids, to that list. I guess it would be most similar to mac.com in that it's web-based, with no downloading or installation required and it comes with a domain name, email addresses and hosting.
The templates are much nicer than the average blogging site and it was designed for the computer illiterate. There's a one week free trial, too.
It's about three inches long, with a joint (or "knuckle") about halfway down and another one 3/4 of the way down, a hard, shell-like section of about 1 square cm at the end which you need to cut every week or two and it's kind of "flesh" coloured.
And it hurts like hell if you get it trapped in a door.
I was always taught that it was shaped like a basketball. This changes everything!
C'mon guys, why would you be so specific about something so generic?
If by slowest you mean of the 7200rpm drives then you are correct, but it's much faster and quieter than a 5400rpm drive. The thing that makes it the best hard drive in the world is not the speed or loudness that it has compared to drives from 2003 - of course they are better, it's refined tech - but that it was such a landmark product. At the time the Barracuda IV came out you could have shown me a 2.5 inch 4200rpm IDE drive with 200 gigabytes and a transfer rate better than a 10,000rpm SCSI RAID array and I wouldn't have been as shocked and impressed as I was when I heard the Barracuda IV.
Seriously, an 80 gigabyte 7200rpm drive, not slow, just not the absolute fastest, and i had to actually hold it up to my ear to hear it. The WD and IBM drives that it replaced could be heard in the next room!
For me it was the equivalent of seeing a 10 gigahertz x86 CPU shipping tomorrow, it was just so far ahead of everything which was around at the time.
It's still my main HD, even though it's only got a handful of gigs left on it and it's fast enough for my needs. Word processing? No, actually I'm doing multitrack audio recording on it and so far I haven't reached its transfer limit. Of course it has one, but it's new software and I haven't pushed it that hard yet, but right now I have a song with about 15 stereo audio tracks and the drive has no problem with that. A 5400rpm drive couldn't do that and I doubt that the fastest modern HD could give me more than a couple of extra tracks so the tradeoff is definitely not there for me.
Don't take the 'best ever in the world' bit too seriously, it's just an expression; one could say it about the Xerox Star or the Amiga. Everything will be obsoleted at some stage. Really it's just a mark of respect for a piece of tech.
This is by far the loudest component in my system. Everybody seems to think that the CPU fan is the biggest culprit but that's only because they have crappy CPU fans. It really doesn't cost much these days to get a 'silent' CPU fan which can be undervolted to be truly silent and still cool these nuclear reactor CPUs that modern PCs have.
After the CPU fan the hard drive is the loudest, but since the Seagate Barracuda IV - the best hard drive ever in the world, which is freakily quiet - hard drive makers have been using the fluid bearing system and I guess most new hard drives are now as quiet as the Barracuda IV.
That leaves case fans, which can be silent and graphics card fans, which apparently are getting quieter too (no fan on my Geforce2MX, so I wouldn't know).
So why didn't the article address the only component which can't be quietened cheaply and easily? 'Silent' PSUs cost a fortune (>$50 for something that most people expect to just be built in to their $30 case) and are far and away the biggest obstacle standing between sanity and tinnitus. I know they must be coming because manufacturers aren't dummies, but they have to realise by now that they are more of a priority that CPU fans, don't they?
"But to say 'the automaton can not be defeated' has a nice ring to it."
I thought that was a great quote. Do you know why? Because it shows that they really are geeks, not just faceless white coats in a lab. Sounds like this guy is a fan of Futurama, Hitchhiker's guide, etc. These are the people I want jeopardising my race's existence:)
Oh, nearly forgot- I for one welcome our new enzyme-powered tic-tac-toe-playing overlords:)
I thought the whole point of hacking and modding was making the hardware do something it wasn't designed to do.
And this is cool because lots of people have these machines and can recognise the hack.
A machine which is designed to be hacked and modded, that almost nobody will buy (compared to ps2/Gamecube/Xbox)?
Excuse me while I go and 'mod' my Amiga 500...
Wow, excellent little article, thanks for the link.
I have exactly that drive (80gig) in my PC now, with about 3 gigs free on it but I'm not even dreaming of flashing it any time soon since there's no 80 gigs worth of backup around the house.
Step 7: # now if everything went well, you can; reboot and watch your system load
# if patching went wrong, you can turn off your computer and cry
That was a classic:)
Killing a device through a failed firmware update is one of the worst "oh fuck, what have i done??" feelings I've ever had. It's worse when the device belongs to you and you don't have and can't afford a replacement. I'm honestly too shit-scared to flash my router (which could seriously benefit, the piece of crap thing that it is) or my mobo bios and now thanks to you I'm afraid to flash my hard drive too!
I don't think it's dishonest; they're just improving their product over time, same as most other electronic gear.
Obviously anyone with any sense would rather buy the Quaddro997XTurbo-XP drive which was made last week than the one made in June. Why? 'Cause the newer one might have some slight improvements somewhere. Might not have, but just in case, you get the newer one.
This is how it is with motherboards, routers, CD burners etc. so I don't see why it's a problem with hard drives. better than having to wait a whole product generation for even the smallest improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
what are they supposed to do- release feature patches every month the same way that hardware makers release revised editions and incremental models? Would you trust a microsoft patch which upgrades the filesystem? I'm not talking about a new media player or email client but some patch to the actual OS.
;)) so at least the whole system has been tested to be compatible with itself. If everyone else has a similar attitude then I guess the best we can do is wait the 1-3 years between versions and be grateful for what we get. One thing microsoft doesn't need is more pressure to rush their software to market.
I would rather wait for a new OS version than add another card to the teetering tower (ok, XP ain't *that* unstable
I've got to reply to this. Firstly check out some different shops. You definitely can get a six month old game with far more than a $10 discount in Oz.
Secondly, what are you smoking and can I have some please? Games don't just come from the US. A lot come from the UK, France, Germany, even Australian studios make games. Why on earth would the US to AU exchange rate be involved here? Australia has its own economy, is its own market and has its own market balance. Or are you saying that you believe Australia is a satellite state of the US and the $A should bounce up and down along with the $US? Check the box of your most recent game. It will say 'printed in Australia' and so will the CD. It's made in your country by your countrymen and priced for your market. Why should another country's currency have an effect on that?
If you were smart what you would do to take advantage of this favourable exchange rate is order 'made in USA' games from the USA over the net. Pay in $US which you bought with $A and you'll save $A20. Use your brain to solve your problem, not your mouth to complain about it.
And finally piracy is huge everywhere. Now please, don't bogart that blunt, pass it over here.
You try before you buy but you had already played right through to the end and still hadn't decided whether you were ready to pay for it or not?
Maybe I'm dumb but what on earth would have motivated you to go to the store and buy the game after you'd already completed it?
I've heard this argument again and again that 'if it's really good I'll buy a copy just to put on the shelf to reward the developers.'. It's bullshit. Once in a blue moon I believe you might do that for a very special game but the prospect of paying $50 for something which you won't use makes a game's chances of getting onto that shelf, well... let's just say slim. The fact that you played the game through to the end, then found a bug and said
Patch or no, failing to catch bugs like that is simply unacceptable. I pay for games that are worth my money.
suggests to me that you were never serious about buying it. Even though you extracted its full purchase value from it. That's not try before buy that's just getting the game for free. I'm not judging you for that - I couldn't give a crap - but don't lie to yourself and especially don't lie to me.
bluGill, that's the first sensible post that I've seen about this whole "I have to buy the whole album to get one song and all the other songs suck" complaint which you always hear in these threads. Anybody who hates 90% of an album by an artist they like needs to seriously question their taste in music.
They used to be called "album tracks" and that's where you find the artist's true sound and personality; what their music is really like when they're not trying to make a no.1 single. Bands like U2 and Queen always had killer tracks on their albums that you would never hear on radio or on a Greatest Hits collection.
These little nuggets are also great because *you* discovered them; it wasn't being forced to hear them 28 times a day on the radio and TV that made you like them, it was simply because you connected with them. Corny as it sounds, that makes them special.
Just wanting to have the hit singles and showing outright contempt for the rest of the music is like sucking the jelly out of a donut and throwing the rest away.
I agree. She's really hot.
Personal Optical... what?
Nobody rides it because it's not actually 'open' yet. It's only running a couple of hours a day, nobody seems to be sure why, but it will start running full time next week or the week after (can't remember).
The taxi ride to and from the airport is just *painful* after a 10-hour flight from Paris or Vienna; it can easily be 1.5 hours and vs. the Transrapid's ten minutes or so is for me just unthinkable. The money difference is negligible considering what stuff costs in Shanghai. $US5 is like seven cans of coke or your half of a nice meal but the speed and convenience (it drops you off right next to a Metro station), not to mention the geek thrill factor, because - as you'll find out - the whole trip is a lot of fun, the decision between taxi and transrapid is as no-brainer as they come.
There is *no way* I'm wasting three hours of my life taking taxis to or from the airport next time I'm in Shanghai.
Wish I had Mod points, cause that was funny. For all mods who didn't understand or who are reading at +2 please click and read about the British scientist who created a bomb which skiped along the water surface, impacted the wall of a dam, rolled down to the wall's base and then exploded, destroying an important German manufacturing area in WWII.
Great film, but also some awesome science.
How on *EARTH* could that possibly be modded Troll?
Come the fuck ON, mods, just because you love Apple doesn't mean... ah, forget it. Talking to a brick wall.
Hope I see you in M2
Wouldn't it make more sense if they'd chosen a last word beginning with a K?
Boinking aliens and cancer with my computer? Sign me up!
What does a cheap PC cost? $299? $200? If I offered you $200 would you take it? I hope you would.
/. readers, they're not for our parents either. These are for people who know *nobody* who knows about computers. All they know is that it's 2003 and everybody is supposed to have a computer in their home. And this one is free. It's like a free gift of $200. And they have to watch some ads. For you and me that's a dealbreaker but not for some people.
These PCs are not for
Get off your high horse. Some people *like* the idea of a free couple of hundred dollars. It's nice that you don't but don't condemn other people for liking free money.
Great post. I believe that's the reason too. I remember (not personally) president Johnson turning up in Australia and doing the same thing to get Aust. into Vietnam, basically just by blowing a whole load of sunshine up the PM's backside and using his vanity and gullibility (and greed, I'm sure) as the key. I found it funny that little Johnny H. didn't even need the president to convince him to go, Colin Powell was enough.
It really made a joke of the Australian people that their leader could be so easily manipulated and even be made to put the US govt. before his own people. The sad thing is that unlike Tony Blair John Howard has a very good chance of being reelected, even though he went against the wishes of the majority of his citizens.
I hope that they kick his arse out onto the street and replace him with someone who is willing to put the interests of his own country ahead of the dictates and bribes of some foreign govt. Take a tip from how New Zealand has always done it; one of the only countries generally brave enough to stand up to the US when they need to.
Australia is too nice to remain a fascist state.
PS. Howard and Blair will be going to hell, but not for a good few years yet, so that doesn't help anyone.
I am amazed. The whole war was for spoils (oil, right?) and Bush is rewarding his allies and punishing his opponents. You're my new guru, Geoff. I thought it was far more complex than that but you really opened my eyes.
And you figured this out all by yourself? Amazing indeed.
I'm smoking Camel Lights, by the way.
My statement was misguided, or your interpretation of my statement is myopic and unimaginative? The Iraq deals are called 'spoils of war'. This is when the victor(s) divide up the profit-making opportunities in the conquered country amongst themselves. Germany, France and Russia, um, weren't in the war. They're not among the victors and that's why America won't share the spoils with them. It makes sense to me.
By the way, count how many British and Australian companies land the gravy contracts. They won't be getting any, but I hope to God that was never the reason for them joining the war, and that's a very important point to make. Actually on second thoughts I hope that's precisely why they joined, because then they just learned a valuable lesson.
This situation, however, has absolutely fuck all to do with the Iraqi war! How hard is that to understand? Australia helped in the war, Australia gets (maybe) favourable treatment **in matters concerning Iraq and the aftermath of the war** but this is just some guy who fucked up, went somewhere where he wasn't welcome and now has a problem. Oh and he's from Australia. What possible relevance does this have to Australia helping in the Iraq war? Why should America have any obligation to help him? Does this mean now that if an Australian on holiday in the US can't afford a hotel that the US govt. has to give him a hotel room because Australia helped in the war?
Good grief, what are you people smoking today?
So you're saying that a human being from Australia should get better treatment from Americans than a human being from France or Germany, because of the support during the war? It's nice that you'd still disagree with it but think for a minute... it's a ludicrous statement. Politics are irrelevant here.
The Australian govt. didn't send this guy there, he's not representing Australia so his nationality shouldn't play any part in this. Would be great if it really worked that way though, I could pull out my old Australian passport next time I go though US customs and they'll let me go to the front of the line in front of the Chinese, French and Germans. That's not really why you guys went to Iraq, is it? To buy a 'special treatment for all our citizens/preferred ally' card?
WTF does supporting the US in the war have to do with this? You went there because your government thought it was the right thing to do, right? Not because you wanted to use it as some kind of guilt trip or bargaining chip in the future... right?
I'd like to add my system, Meddling Kids, to that list. I guess it would be most similar to mac.com in that it's web-based, with no downloading or installation required and it comes with a domain name, email addresses and hosting.
The templates are much nicer than the average blogging site and it was designed for the computer illiterate. There's a one week free trial, too.
It's about three inches long, with a joint (or "knuckle") about halfway down and another one 3/4 of the way down, a hard, shell-like section of about 1 square cm at the end which you need to cut every week or two and it's kind of "flesh" coloured.
And it hurts like hell if you get it trapped in a door.
Indian analysis are already on the news saying We can lunch a man into space if we wanted too...
Mmmmm... Indian food, Chinese food, those guys can lunch *me* in space anytime!
I was always taught that it was shaped like a basketball. This changes everything!
C'mon guys, why would you be so specific about something so generic?
If by slowest you mean of the 7200rpm drives then you are correct, but it's much faster and quieter than a 5400rpm drive. The thing that makes it the best hard drive in the world is not the speed or loudness that it has compared to drives from 2003 - of course they are better, it's refined tech - but that it was such a landmark product. At the time the Barracuda IV came out you could have shown me a 2.5 inch 4200rpm IDE drive with 200 gigabytes and a transfer rate better than a 10,000rpm SCSI RAID array and I wouldn't have been as shocked and impressed as I was when I heard the Barracuda IV.
Seriously, an 80 gigabyte 7200rpm drive, not slow, just not the absolute fastest, and i had to actually hold it up to my ear to hear it. The WD and IBM drives that it replaced could be heard in the next room!
For me it was the equivalent of seeing a 10 gigahertz x86 CPU shipping tomorrow, it was just so far ahead of everything which was around at the time.
It's still my main HD, even though it's only got a handful of gigs left on it and it's fast enough for my needs. Word processing? No, actually I'm doing multitrack audio recording on it and so far I haven't reached its transfer limit. Of course it has one, but it's new software and I haven't pushed it that hard yet, but right now I have a song with about 15 stereo audio tracks and the drive has no problem with that. A 5400rpm drive couldn't do that and I doubt that the fastest modern HD could give me more than a couple of extra tracks so the tradeoff is definitely not there for me.
Don't take the 'best ever in the world' bit too seriously, it's just an expression; one could say it about the Xerox Star or the Amiga. Everything will be obsoleted at some stage. Really it's just a mark of respect for a piece of tech.
This is by far the loudest component in my system. Everybody seems to think that the CPU fan is the biggest culprit but that's only because they have crappy CPU fans. It really doesn't cost much these days to get a 'silent' CPU fan which can be undervolted to be truly silent and still cool these nuclear reactor CPUs that modern PCs have.
After the CPU fan the hard drive is the loudest, but since the Seagate Barracuda IV - the best hard drive ever in the world, which is freakily quiet - hard drive makers have been using the fluid bearing system and I guess most new hard drives are now as quiet as the Barracuda IV.
That leaves case fans, which can be silent and graphics card fans, which apparently are getting quieter too (no fan on my Geforce2MX, so I wouldn't know).
So why didn't the article address the only component which can't be quietened cheaply and easily? 'Silent' PSUs cost a fortune (>$50 for something that most people expect to just be built in to their $30 case) and are far and away the biggest obstacle standing between sanity and tinnitus. I know they must be coming because manufacturers aren't dummies, but they have to realise by now that they are more of a priority that CPU fans, don't they?
"But to say 'the automaton can not be defeated' has a nice ring to it."
:)
:)
I thought that was a great quote. Do you know why? Because it shows that they really are geeks, not just faceless white coats in a lab. Sounds like this guy is a fan of Futurama, Hitchhiker's guide, etc. These are the people I want jeopardising my race's existence
Oh, nearly forgot- I for one welcome our new enzyme-powered tic-tac-toe-playing overlords
I thought the whole point of hacking and modding was making the hardware do something it wasn't designed to do.
And this is cool because lots of people have these machines and can recognise the hack.
A machine which is designed to be hacked and modded, that almost nobody will buy (compared to ps2/Gamecube/Xbox)?
Excuse me while I go and 'mod' my Amiga 500...
Wow, excellent little article, thanks for the link.
:)
I have exactly that drive (80gig) in my PC now, with about 3 gigs free on it but I'm not even dreaming of flashing it any time soon since there's no 80 gigs worth of backup around the house.
Step 7: # now if everything went well, you can; reboot and watch your system load
# if patching went wrong, you can turn off your computer and cry
That was a classic
Killing a device through a failed firmware update is one of the worst "oh fuck, what have i done??" feelings I've ever had. It's worse when the device belongs to you and you don't have and can't afford a replacement. I'm honestly too shit-scared to flash my router (which could seriously benefit, the piece of crap thing that it is) or my mobo bios and now thanks to you I'm afraid to flash my hard drive too!
I don't think it's dishonest; they're just improving their product over time, same as most other electronic gear.
Obviously anyone with any sense would rather buy the Quaddro997XTurbo-XP drive which was made last week than the one made in June. Why? 'Cause the newer one might have some slight improvements somewhere. Might not have, but just in case, you get the newer one.
This is how it is with motherboards, routers, CD burners etc. so I don't see why it's a problem with hard drives. better than having to wait a whole product generation for even the smallest improvement.
btw, can you flash the firmware on hard drives?